For the second year in a row, MWA has awarded its biographical/critical Edgar to a Hitchcock-related volume, following John Billheimer’s Hitchcock and the Censors, reviewed here in MS #163.
Joan Harrison (1907-1998) was hired in 1933 as an assistant to Alfred Hitchcock, already a prominent figure in the British film industry, and she remained close to the director and his family throughout her life. Late in her life, she became the wife of the great writer of espionage and intrigue Eric Ambler. But she’s worthy of interest well beyond these two connections.
Working for Hitchcock, she was exposed to and absorbed every aspect of the filmmaking process, becoming more and more useful to her mentor. As a screenwriter, she contributed stronger women characters to his late British and early American films, notably the adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941), adapted from Francis Iles’ Before the Fact, both of which presented problems with the Production Code and necessitated alternative endings.
After leaving Hitchcock in the 1940s, Harrison established an independent career as writer and producer, a challenging task for a woman in Hollywood of that time, especially the producer part. She received cowriting credits on Jamaica Inn (1939) with Sidney Gilliat, Rebecca (1940) with Robert E. Sherwood, Foreign Correspondent (1940) with Charles Bennett, Suspicion with Samson Raphaelson and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock), and Saboteur (1942) with Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. But she had received no producer credits. That would change with Ella Raines and Franchot Tone in Phantom Lady (1944). the film that gives the book its title.
She had tried to shop around her script based on Phantom Lady (1944), from the 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. Though there was some interest, the changes she made to appeal to a female audience caused resistance. Her script stuck to the main plot of the novel (businessman wrongfully accused and convicted of murdering his wife spent the evening with a mysterious unnamed lady who could prove his alibi but whom no one else admits having seen), but shifts the main detecting role to the accused man’s secretary. Though Harrison did the whole job herself, she would be listed as associate producer in the official credits. The working script was hers, but because rules prohibited dual writing and producing credits at that time, the sole screenwriter credited was Bernard C. Schoenfeld.
Both Phantom Lady (1944) and another classic film noir, They Won’t Believe Me (1947), have male leads cast against type (Franchot Tone and Robert Young respectively) and complex female characters hard to label as either femme fatales or damsels in distress. The author describes these films and others in considerable detail, and as a recent viewer of them both, I share her high opinion of their quality and originality.
Harrison’s contribution to the early days of American television was also considerable. She produced Janet Dean, Registered Nurse for the 1954-55 season, a half-hour syndicated series with Ella Raines, who had starred in Phantom Lady, and then reunited with her mentor to produce seven seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962), episodes of its successors Suspicion (1957- 58) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962- 65), and other series.
This is an excellent biography, supported by a detailed filmography, bibliography, and selection of photographs.
